An extraordinary archive from the extended family of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the great English Romantic poets, has been bought by the British Library.
The vast treasury of papers revealing the family's bemused if affectionate view of the maverick talent in their midst had been kept in family ownership in Ottery St Mary, the Devon village where the poet was born, for two centuries.
But when the family reluctantly decided this year to sell The Chanter's House, the home acquired by Samuel's brother James in 1796, the volumes of papers and diaries had to go too.
The National Heritage Memorial Fund - the fund of last resort for saving important heritage for the nation - donated £250,000, which was boosted by grants from half a dozen other bodies to secure the family's archive for an unspecified sum.
Frances Harris, head of modern historical manuscripts, said its importance lay not only in the new material relating to Samuel Taylor Coleridge himself, but in the extensive social network of his relatives and heirs as the Coleridges went up in the world. Notably, the archive includes the journals and court-room notes of three successive generations of Coleridge judges who sat on famous cases, including that of the Tichborne claimant, an imposter who claimed to be a missing wealthy heir. (It was the subject of a 1998 film.)
And there are hundreds of letters to and from luminaries including Matthew Arnold, the poet, William Gladstone, the Prime Minister, Cardinal Newman, the Catholic convert, and the architect AW Pugin.
"A vast cast of eminent Victorians is in this wonderful archive," Ms Harris said. "They became a very prominent family and their correspondence reflects that."
The core of the papers relating to Samuel Taylor Coleridge himself is correspondence with his nephew, Sir John Taylor Coleridge, who was around 18 years his junior and the first of the family's judges.
One of the most important features of the collection for literary scholars is the young Sir John's schoolbook in which, following the practice of the time, he wrote poetry and copied poems he liked.
He included poems copied from his uncle's original papers, which scholars will compare with later published versions.
When Sir John was older, he recorded in a letter home how he had heard his uncle speak. "He did make this enormous impact. Even for people who knew him, he was a dazzling conversationalist and lecturer," Ms Harris said.
In other papers, Sir John described going to the Lake District and meeting William Wordsworth, who showed him the first lake vista that he had shown Samuel Taylor Coleridge and recalled how Coleridge's face had brightened at the sight. Another item sheds some light on the environment in which Samuel Taylor Coleridge was raised.
His father was the local clergyman and among the archive is a parish account book recording details of everything from the workhouse to misdeeds.
Long after Coleridge's death in 1834 at the age of 61, the papers record family reminiscences of the man Sir John knew as Uncle Sam.
The poet was acknowledged as an extraordinarily gifted man, but an erratic genius.
As his own son Hartley put it: "There's some screw loose in the whole marvellous machine."
Ms Harris said: "He was a puzzle at the heart of the family. He was the presiding genius, but he was, in some sense, outside the family, because he just didn't fit into the mould of this very solid professional group of people.
"On the other hand, he defined them."
But lawyers will be as fascinated by the archive as literary researchers including papers pertaining to Sir John Taylor's son, the first Baron Coleridge, who became Lord Chief Justice of England.
The archive, which includes 350 bound volumes, including diaries and the judges' notebooks, and 29 large archive boxes, will now be catalogued.
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